Reza Negarestani A Case of a Critique of Critique Boltzmann’s Time-Drift

Thank you everyone. It's great to be here. So, I mean, for an hour, an hour, I don't know, 15, 20 minutes, I'm going to, you know, selectively read some of the passages in that chapter in intelligence and spirit, you know, some unsettling Canton news as delivered by Ludwig Boltzmann. And I will add commentaries. Mostly, I try to either add, you know,

clarificatory or perhaps nicely confusing more, you know, comments. Or, you know, I think it's necessary to, if we are revisiting this text, to add a little bit of self-criticism and with a renewed eye about some of the problems and how they can be tackled. I will then the last part of that chapter, which is called the view from nowhere. I will try to introduce some of the themes, renewed themes, so to speak, by way of a few

diagrams. And I think after that, we will have a break and then we can reconvene and open it up to discussion. So it's perhaps good to actually understand what is the motivation of that chapter in intelligence and spirits right um first and foremost um i think intelligence spirit i'm saying this only through reflection

is a book about not really AGI or AI at all, while it is actually, but it is that we have arrived at a certain moment, historical moment, of being capable of reflecting upon the human, the enigma of the human, by way of certain sort of models, right, AI models, even the highly speculative and hypothetical existence possibility of an artificial general

intelligence, a strong AI. So the book is essentially what you might call to be a philosophical fiction of some sort, right? Written in the vein of people who have already written works of, you know, philosophical fiction, such as, for example, Ibn Haytham and other people, you know, during the scholastic age, the Islamic enlightenment, where you essentially make certain sorts of story, right, a narrative, an overarching narrative,

even if you know that some of the philosophical problems that you are working with are not modes of a storytelling, but then you have to somehow create that lens of a story and through which you reflect back on the philosophical questions in a renewed eye. What I have in mind is something like Theologics Autodidactus, right? One of the greatest works of, you know, Islamic enlightenment. And yes, there is that sort of, you know, I would say ambience within intelligence and spirit

from the get-go in the sense that AGI is being propped up as an excuse to reflect back on the question of the human, but with a renewed I, right? And this renewed I is, of course, you know, entails the incorporation of the unfoldings of modes of inquiry. Such as, for example, theory of computation. theoretical computer science par excellence uh you know advancement in model making engineering

cognitive sciences and so on and so forth but of course you know when you are telling that sort of a story if it is a story you and also a philosophical problem you have to kind of bracket the certain sorts of methods that you are using it is not as if uh you have infinite number of pages that is clear, but you also, I think, if you want to make that sort of a story, that reflective story, within the vein of philosophy, but mediated by something that its relations with philosophy are far from settled, namely the question of artificial general intelligence.

You have to bracket methods. You can't use all sorts of methods. You would essentially inevitably find yourself in a very nasty sort of scenario where basically there would be a methodological explosion, right? a certain sort of highly undesirable form of pluralism for the sake of pluralism so yes intelligent spirit is at the end of the day is a certain sort of reflection a moment of reflection mediated now

not by our natural attitudes but by phenomenological and transcendental modes of reflection now highly becoming sophisticated by way of things like developments in logic in theoretical computer science and so on and so forth yet it should be understood that intelligence and spirit deeply is committed from the start to the end to a specific mode of reflection within a very specific context of inquiry.

This context is philosophical anthropology, one, and two, transcendental psychology. Philosophical anthropology, what you are called to be essentially an anthropology about the essences of the human, right? Of course, the determination of thus and so itis, forms or essences, is a task. And hence, it is something that you can call an ongoing process.

and transcendental psychology pertains to the topic of an investigation of the conditions of possibility of having a mind right so intelligent spirits is is written as that mode of reflection about the human within these two contexts, intertwining context, but by a renewed sort of lens, eye. And within this context, I think the problem of the chapter that I've shared, you know, the Boltzmann chapter becomes rather prominent, at least to me.

Why? Precisely because when we are talking about critical philosophy or the critique in the sense of Kant's critique of pure reason, we mean an inquiry a systematic scrutiny in the conditions of possibilities of having objective claims of having a mind of developing logic and so on and so forth that is critique

in a very conventional Kantian sort of sense. But then, obviously, critical philosophy does not and should not stop at the question of conditions of possibility. But rather investigate why and how It is that such conditions of possibility are in place, number one, and how and why the integration of such conditions of possibilities motivate an agency in the Kantian-Hegelian sense.

Right. So two sort of ideas here. That if we don't simply accept the conditions of possibilities of being an agent, of a rational agent, but start to scrutinize these conditions of possibilities, either we have to answer, or both actually, either we have to answer why is that these conditions of possibilities are in place, and two, what is exactly in these conditions of possibilities?

whose synthesis, namely integration, motivate agency to be thus and so, a rational agency. Like, why are we actually motivated to have something called beauty? Or logic, in fact. Or for that matter, represent the world to ourselves, right? um so that opens up um a far you know broader sort of scenario philosophical scenario uh and Boltzmann chapter is actually a a very miniature sort of encapsulation of that

what you might call to be a mode of inquiry about the modes of inquiry, critique of critique, right? Critique being understood in the latter sense as conditions of possibilities of having thus and so, you know, agential qualities, self-conscious qualities. so in that sense i was thinking about this sort of chapter that you know one of the preenial questions of philosophy is the question of time

particularly time not as a really a metaphysical entity right not as a part of reality but most importantly, time as constituting and constituted factor of consciousness, right? The enigma of time handed to us by way of people like Parmenides, and most importantly, highlighted by Saint Augustine, and then moving onward by way of Kant Hegel in today's uh you know um scenes in philosophy by people like I don't know you there are so many of

them um um gunbaum uh earman um cd broad um hugh price and so on and so forth so it would be interesting to apply that sort of context to this sort of question the question of time, right, within the specific ambit of inquiring about the sort of modes of inquiries or intuitions available to us to think about the problem, right? So this sort of, what do you want called we twist, right away opens up a new continent of inquiry. What is that content of

inquiry? Traditionally, philosophical forms of inquiry, not all of them, but majority of them, are either of metaphysics in, metaphysics out, called MIMO, escepticism in, escepticism out, SISO, and escepticism in, problem out, SIPO. Meaning that for us to inquire coherently about a problem, first we should be fundamentally skeptical about the means and resources of us

being capable of coherently thinking about these problems such as resolving them later this let me share my screen um mimo metaphysics in metaphysics out you know you you give think about philosophy as a sort of computational black box where you feed it a metaphysical assumption and of course it will yield, a metaphysical output, right? Then there would be a kind of pyrenic sort of a skepticism

of the utmost sort of systematic skepticism called SISO. You give it a piece of a skepticism, it will yield a piece of a skepticism of a higher degree, more intense, or a critical form of skepticism that I call the critique of critique. SIPO, skepticism in, problem out. Because it can be very well the case that the sort of problems that we in philosophy trying to investigate and resolve can be the consequences of highly ambiguous, if not

fundamentally ill-defined and misguided sort of intuitions about the nature of the problem itself. so you have to change your approach to the problem such that you can create philosophical problems right philosophy is a circle of revenge that never closes its own circle right that i call the critique of critique and in my opinion the first systematic philosopher

who entertained the simple paradigm of philosophy a skepticism in a skepticism as a way in but not a way out a skepticism as a way in only to hone out a problem would be none other than the greatest British philosopher, David Hume. That was Hume's very systematic idea of understanding or re-understanding the nature of philosophical problems. Namely, when the scrutiny of the fundaments makes you aware of thus and so fundaments.

And of course, this skepticism should be understood methodologically rather than arbitrarily. insofar as the sort of skepticism that we do talk about is not pure Pyronic skepticism right and it's not a form of greedy skepticism of people like Gorgias right right but it is a humble and humbling method of epochal, right?

Suspension and bracketing. In order for us to look at a specific sort of problem, under a class of identities given for this sort of problem, we have to make sure that the type of the problem will always be investigated under the very type that gave rise initially to this problem and none others. Hence, you have to suspend the sort of classes of problems

or arriving at a problem that might not be as specific, so as specific to the problem itself. With regard to the question of time, it is quite actually prominent. You see, we have certain sorts of natural attitudes, psychologistic attitudes, so to speak, to talk about time, you know, as if we could simply project our natural, the resources of our natural language, tense language, onto the world and say that, well, you know, the time flows.

precisely because tense language says so. Or because I think like that, because I have been habituated to think like that. So epoch in that sort of methodological skepticism strive to systematically, namely pace-wise, step by step, to dehabituate the means of habituation. Dehabituating how we do actually deal with philosophical questions of grand horizon,

like time, space, the other, so on and so forth. This is what I call critique of critique under the rubric of critique of transcendental structure. Transcendental structures. and this specific chapter the Boltzmann chapter has been written particularly in this vein of philosophical spirit right I'm not saying that this philosophical spirit is better than other sort of philosophical spirit it's just that this was the motivation behind writing that chapter

so maybe I know that Sepide we talked about that we can only open up to the questions after the fact precisely because there is a lot of stuff that I'm going to deliver maybe once in a while we can open it up to like two questions to short questions so does anyone have a question at this point either clarification points or otherwise yes alex yes hi um so i've been thinking like even since the like text that i've read like in

preparation for this so if you're talking about um skepticism as a way in rather than out um these these kind of directional i guess qualifiers um what are you talking about here between between in and out is this like about um not falling back on like this this kind of falling back, yes, not falling back. Essentially, I made a specific reference to Gorgias, right? So Gorgias is a prime philosopher of a skepticism in a skepticism out. A skepticism out is a form of greedy skepticism. It essentially, you see what actually a skepticism, greedy skepticism is,

is a form of you, generally speaking, so to speak, use the method of inquiry, and hence all the assumptions that come with those methods of inquiry. And yet you use it against those methods itself. Hence, there is an incompatibilism. It's too greedy. It wants to prove a point by simply cutting its own knees, right? Cutting its own arguments. That's what I call a greedy skepticism. Gorgias is actually famous for that. Whereas methodological skepticism as a Saipo

is that it is not as if we are, you see, skepticism is like a poison. Ibn Bahshia, the Arab scholar who wrote the book of poisons, had this fantastic idea. With poisons, poisons are poisons precisely because you are either taking too little of something or too much of something, right? You can say the same thing about the organon of a skepticism, right? If you take too much of it, it poisons you. It poisons the mind. And also, if you take a little bit of it, just only a little bit of it, you just don't know what

to do with it, right? And it just, you enter in the realm of a cognitive desolation. First and foremost, a skepticism needs to be unpacked a stepwise. That's why I'm saying methodological or systematic skepticism that allows for modes of inquiry to be built methodologically, but only for us to be capable of reflecting back that maybe these methods that we have used, not all of them at once, but one by one, these methods that we have used based on our cherished intuitions

might actually not be true. But is this not also, so I think my issue, maybe this like goes a little bit beyond, Maybe we'll have to cut this short and talk about this after the fact again. But is this not also reached by the too much kind of way of talking about poisons? Yes, yes. But as I said, the systematicity is really important in the sense that a truly systematic skepticism like Hume's or even Descartes, to be honest with you, are are very controlled unpacking

of their skeptical poison, right? Such that it becomes part of your life. Philosophical life, so to speak. It doesn't work against it. Right. But isn't the kind of the main sort of drive of skepticism to work against i guess like what you're doing no that would be greedy skepticism skepticism that would be pyronic skepticism right skepticism in skepticism out but skepticism can also be understood as simply a method of renegotiating problems.

I guess my question is, from what point is this the preferable option, this middle ground? I think the middle ground actually becomes essentially a form of understanding on one level that you do not, that your mode of a skeptical inquiry or a scrutiny does not become incompatible with the sort of method that you are employing, right, in a global sense, meaning that it does not lead to confusion in a Platonic sense, right, a pure confusion, right, in the sense that you betray everything, including your own

skeptical methods, right? Right. Because skepticism can really come back and bite the butt of skepticism itself. That is actually the scary thing about skepticism, greedy skepticism. But rather, a controlled introduction of that poison, right? That renews the way that you think about the problems. Okay, yeah, I get where you're coming from. There's another question, I'll leave it. sure martin martin you are i think you're mute okay hi reza um so i i need a clarification uh of strategy here

um when you shift from philosophy of mind to philosophy of intelligence you seem to be refracting the notion of the human through that aspect of the human which can be dematerialized or maybe a better word would be disembodied and i wouldn't call it disembodied but rather search for the essences eidetic insights right uh but by doing so you're working through a set of assumptions which um

seems to imply that it's possible to disembody intelligence as that aspect of the human worth preserving. Yes. So there's a whole there's a whole range of assumptions. Yes, of course. And these assumptions should be laid bare for everyone to see. Essentially, I would say quite the converse in the sense that so long as we believe on a semblance of mindedness, namely the organon of the structuration.

right because otherwise we would be merely peddling the myth of the given sedars and all that sort of jazz right and so far as uh mind of this sort of stuff not a stuff but of of a of a system of a structuration then we have already built a certain sort of assumptions in the very organon of mind, right, in favor of not having certain sort of metaphysical vagaries about the nature of the world or the myths of the given, right? So the moment that mind already assumes that

sort of assumptions in the Kantian sort of way, right, in transcendental term. It's just that philosophy of intelligence takes this one step further, but not by simply assuming that those assumptions that go within the realm of the mind and the constitution of mind, all of them are cogent but I would say that yes there is actually a component of a speculative philosophy whether we like it or not within critical philosophy it has always been there since Kant onwards that some of these assumptions are not actually the classes

of assumptions that can be called critical they are speculative by nature It's just that it's important that we first distinguish between these two classes of problems, critical and speculative, at every moment that we are unfolding the system, philosophical system, but also bearing the consequences of the critique and speculation upon one another. in the sense that it would be a renegotiation of these assumptions because unfortunately whether we like it or not some of these assumptions are literally the manners of givenness

of agency they are not myths of the given they are manners by way of which you cannot actually make any sort of, you know, found any sort of interesting sort of problem. Yes, yes, I completely understand the point here. Yes, but I would say that it's not really the philosophy of intelligence. I think that we can actually go down the ladder and say that philosophy of mind has these assumptions as well and there would be a necessity for us to renegotiate the scope and the veracity of such assumptions for the philosophy of mind such that

through this renegotiation we ascend to something called a philosophy of intelligence philosophy of intelligence does not really mean disembodiment. I generally disagree with that sort of statement. I think philosophy of intelligence is simply the idea that mind is with the world. So mind... By mind with the world, do you mean mind in the world? with the world I I intentionally used it not in the Heideggerian sense but rather in in the vein of Transcendental Pragmatism with the world okay I um I I I don't want to take up more time but I

I'm really interested in these questions and particularly in the relationship between embodied and distributed cognition yes yeah no i mean like i used to be i used to be extremely dismissive of such sort of concerns but now i actually think that they are fundamentally great i just think that a lot of embodied mind stuff ends up to be pre-critical philosophy. I've really bought into Deleuze's sense that when addressing questions

one must bring to bear philosophical concepts, scientific percepts, and artistic constructs and and um so recently for me that's been jazz as a thought experiment to address these kind of issues the issues that you're addressing right now and so i'm i i'll stop here but i'm saying i'm really looking forward to seeing how how this talk unfolds so thank you Absolutely, absolutely. It's great to be here. Yeah. Sipide, I mean, I just saw that Adrian said someone should prod Reza Su.

Look, I cannot actually, my eyesight is really bad. I cannot read the chat box. So someone please do tell me what's going on in the chat box, if something that has come up that I should answer. Amanda, it's Amanda. Hello, Amanda. How are you? I had a comment, but I can I'm just saying that I had a comment and it was the top one, but I can wait. I don't really need you to answer it. So anyone else? No, no, no. I'm pretty sure that you're like yes, let's ask this. No, it's fine. If I don't let you to ask it. I'm just saying that for the rest of the people in the chat who went

after me, if they're being polite because I was at the top, then they go. No, no, you have to ask it. That's all I'm saying. Actually, you see, if a person doesn't ask a philosophical question, most probably that person is going to have a very bad night. Right. It's like like lack of fulfillment. Right. You have to do it. You have to do it. It's very quick. And I think someone else had a very similar question as well. um and I think that person's Carl who lasts similar in the chat to what I did I basically was it Carl Olsen it was uh yeah so I'm kind of like referring to him too and he can put me right

but I I was just saying in a kind of snarky way uh because I don't believe that you think like this but it did sound a little bit when you were talking like Goldilocks, um, if you know what I mean by that. You have to elaborate. Okay, so you know the story of Goldilocks? Yes. Okay, and there's the porridge and it's just right. So there's the porridge that's too sweet and the porridge that's not sweet enough and then there's a porridge that's just right and Goldilocks likes that one. So in one sense, you know, in the critique, in the critique that brackets, there's a suspension, as you were saying, which creates a kind of negation of relations in some

form. It does not negate relations. Well, this is my question. It's simply what it does. the critique of the critique is literally is a form of what Husserl calls rookfragen right questioning back why are you so motivated to think about the problem in this sort of way and not others. This is called Rookfragen. There is a methodological way to actually create a questioning back path. So yeah, my reference to Goldilocks was basically

trying to ask something sneaky, like, can you say something more about the condition of the relation, i.e. it's all porridge, and the condition of the suspension, and how we can think through the two together, is that like, are you framing that as a kind of dialectical operation? I mean, that would be a vulgar Hegelianism, I would say, if we just simply say, well, you know, it's all dialectics. If dialectics could actually take care of the world, we wouldn't be here, We would be on a different sort of planet, in a different world, so to speak. Yes, it is of course dialectical is nature,

but in a very abstract sort of way. Boltzmann made it concrete for the first time in the sense that, look, I'm not talking about the end game. of methodological skepticism or SIPO skepticism in problem out, but rather the stepping stone. What should be done first and foremost? Look, you are so beholden, I mean, you as us, all of us, you are so beholden to this intuition of a time passage. The time has certain sort of transitional properties and change is real and so is becoming or time flow okay that's all good great on the paper

but let's actually try to apply that sort of entrenched intuitions onto a phenomenon, an order of appearance, where basically the order of appearance and its explanatory level are fundamentally incompatible. That's Boltzmann's idea about the unfolding or the escaping of gas from an idealized closed system.

That would be just an appearance, right? And then we know by way of a statistical physics and physics proper, that the sort of assumptions that goes into the construction of this sort of appearance from a scientific point of view do not require for any sort of escaping such that the gas never actually come back to the bottom so that is a form of a skepticism essentially you are reintroducing a very cherished intuition of yours

to a set of incompatible problems. And hence, you see how, whether it actually holds ground or not. It is actually a very Persian idea, not a paraconsistency, but contra-consistency, in the sense that arguments of any sort of kind are neither a chain of inferences such that if you lose one chain you lose the other like it's not a deductive chain right but rather it is like a cable

where basically uh various sorts of inferences are woven together these are you might call to be the strength and weaknesses of various arguments moving against one another. And then ultimately, an intuition should be projected into that sort of cable, right? In the Persian cable, metaphor of cable, such that we actually see that, look, how comes then we are so motivated to create something like um philosophy of the second law saying that

the entirety of the universe will be entropic or all sorts of you know ideological assumptions that comes from that sort of stuff, right? It's precisely because nothing actually guarantees it. If you project that sort of intuition onto a set of incompatible positions, that's one of the greatest inventions of Pyronic skepticism, projecting intuitions onto sets of incompatible positions and see how it actually evolves.

Does it intensify the incompatibility or does it resolve the incompatibility? That was, as I said, to my mind is Hume's greatest invention. A skepticism in, problem out. That's the only way that philosophy can actually function healthy. Everything else, either under the name of the critique or speculation, would be just a mimo. Metaphysics in, metaphysics out. is a lip service to metaphysical gloat wave

so uh jesus christ it's one o'clock already uh let's have five minutes break if uh come back refreshed. I actually won't read anything from the chapter. I think that I actually overprepared for this session. I think that I should actually get into the nitty-gritty of this stuff. With regard to Amanda's also, what I have actually in mind as a sort of good attempt,

but ultimately a failure, and Amanda knows the reference, it's a magnificent book by Nathan Brown called Rationalist Empiricism. At the beginning of this book, Nathan introduces the necessity to bring empiricism or rationalism into an intertwinement, such that they can actually complement dynamically one another. Yet, within the introduction, and I have said this to a couple of friends, it seems that Nathan takes for granted critical philosophy,

the organon of critical philosophy, right? In the sense that experience, being on the side of empiricism and rationalism, being on the side of what you might call to be the certain sort of judgments that we do, a sense or a system of judgments that we do make about ourselves and the world for granted, such that experience, the relation between experience and reason can be understood as a dynamic one. Well, it's really great on paper, right? I just think that is a fundamentally flawed philosophical idea

precisely because neither reason nor experience in the overarching philosophical history, the questions of experience or reason are not settled. So the assumption of rationalist empiricism enters into the picture by way of a forced settlement of what experience is and what reason can be, such that they actually entertain a certain sort of dynamic relationship.

But it's actually quite clear from that introduction that even though Brown wants to reinvigorate the speculative philosophies, you know, reinvigoration of critical philosophy, is already actually working in the ambit of orthodox critical philosophy by virtue of thinking of experience in a very Kantian sense and reason in a very Hegelian sense. None of these are actually settled philosophical questions.

Rationalism is not a settled problem. It's an investigation. Remember, Descartes is one of the greatest rationalists. But Descartes' rationalism, exactly how it matches Kantian rationalism or Hegelian rationalism, right? rationalism for Descartes as Hosselle had it in Cartesian meditations is the organon of pure doubt depletion and amplification of objectivity a form of rationalism that does not incorporate the idea of doubt

into its system is not worth its name and a form of experience of empirical source that merely takes sensations and categories and imagination in the Kantian sense for granted. it's not worth to be called experience. Because experience is the most opaque form of consciousness. It suffers positively and negatively

by a very special form of transparency. that is ultimately an opaqueness the life of consciousness namely the totality of life of consciousness the horizon of life is never given to consciousness itself as a unity precisely because it's not given as a unity consciousness is always a certain sort of self-splitting phenomenon in a Husserlian sense or in Freud's sense, a repressive sort of phenomenon.

I mean, if you want to interpret it negatively or positively or negatively. So none of these sort of positions to me settle anything, either methodologically, or ontologically with regard to what is at the stake. I think that we have to hone out methodological apparatus worthy of the name of philosophy. And I think that, yes, it's not as if I'm saying

that only recently by way of theoretical computer science and logic we have come across these no i think that they have always been there it's just that um it's just that philosophy um can be very well understood not only as this sort of dynamic circle of revenge that never it closes a circle, but also as a fundamental circle of idleness, intellectual idleness. And that actually is quite, to be honest with you, it's quite scary. And I think Boltzmann coming from a very specific trajectory in philosophy, Boltzmann was a philosopher

and a scientist, right? He was equally good at both. He was coming from a very deep trajectory in philosophy by way of Hume, by way of Descartes, by way of most contemporaneous to himself, by way of Brentano. Brentano being the teacher of Alexius Menon, Freud, and Husserl. Boltzmann was fundamentally enlivened

and animated by Brentano's ideas about the unconscious and the passage of time. and how we can actually think about appearances right this is the main entry of uh Boltzmann into philosophy like so appearances can be have thus and so appearances and you know certain sort of distribution and stuff and he knew about the sort of new science, descriptive science called phenomenology, right? Either Brentonian phenomenology or Hosselian phenomenology, which are completely different.

But also he wanted to really introduce phenomenology into science itself. phenomenology is the science of appearances so what does it mean to introduce a science of appearances into science as a means of explanation of appearances this was Boltzmann main entry into the problem of time asymmetry which I'm going to talk about someone had a question who was that yeah I think that was me hi Ressa hello but I think maybe it's better to leave that

until the end because it's going to wrap back into what Amanda and also Alex were asking about so if you want to go through your thing now sure love you so let's think about Boltzmann problem is a very sort of a specific problem. Let me... One second. Am I sharing the screen or not?

No, okay. Okay, okay. I don't think that we need to share the screen at this point. So sorry, I'm just trying to. Okay, so the main question for Boltzmann and perhaps even Gibbs at the end of the 19th

is a very premium question of philosophy, the question of time. They both, in their own different sort of ways, think that it would be biased argument to infer the objective reality of temporal direction, a dynamic flow-like picture of time, or even the objective reality of time as such from either the originary perception of temporal instances or the tensed consciousness of time in an ordinary language. You can call this a skepticism by way of skepticism about three highly cherished intuitions about the concept of

time. One, the view that the present moment is objectively distinguished as a frame or a box or block whose contents variably change. This we can call presentism, orthodox presentism. present is all there is there is nothing else to time right and the the idea of presentism has been laid out quite coherently and systematically and criticized also by Charlie Broad.

Broad says, we are naturally tempted to regard the history of the world as existing eternally in a certain order of events along this and a fixed direction. We imagine the characteristics of presentness as moving somewhat like the spot of light from a policeman's bull's eye traversing the front of the house in a street. What is illuminated is the present. What has been illuminated is the past, and what has not yet been illuminated is the future. I will come back

to the first one, and the present thesis shortly. The second, you know, what you might call the challengeable idea would be the view that time has an objective direction, that it is an objective matter which of two non-simultaneous events is the earlier and the other is later. Three, the view that there is something objectively dynamic, flux-like or flow-like about time. You know, the Heraclitian flux

and that sort of stuff. Preuss, with regard to presentism, which is the most, what you might call to be sinister form of time bias, talks about the puzzle of C. D. Broad like this. It says, there is something deeply puzzling about Broad's metaphor. However, after all, think about this sort of scenario. Place yourself at any moment in time and ask yourself, is this moment the present moment?

The right answer, obviously, is yes. a fact guaranteed by the stipulation that you are to ask the question of a moment at the moment but this means that if the houses in a street are to play the role of moments of time in broad analogy then the answer to the question if you place yourself in one of the houses and open the front door, will the policeman's bull's eye be shining in your face like a sniper laser, right? Must also be yes, according to Price, shining on all the houses, not just on one.

And then continues, one might reply that this objection ignores the fact that the light shines on each house in succession. So that we simply need to add a temporal stipulation that is not given by the terms of temporalization. That is the most important thing. To add a temporal stipulation to the question about what you see when you open the front door for all to be well. Will you see the light? Perhaps, but it depends on when you open the door. But this reply somehow overlooks the fact that the series of houses was supposed to be playing the role of the series of temporal moments.

To introduce this temporal aspect to the question, we would need a second temporal parameter, other than the one assumed to be represented by the series of houses. Now, some philosophers have been prepared to bite the bullet to try to save the notion of a distinguishing and yet changing present moment. but the option is neither appealing nor promising. In the present context, the obvious objection is that the issues of making sense of flow will arise all over again,

right, with respect to the second temporal dimension, and hence that will have made no progress by introducing it. The source of difficulty, according to Price, is that, in his own words, is that moving a spotlight view is trying to combine two elements, which pull in opposite directions. On the one hand, it wants to be exclusive, saying that one moment is objectively distinguished. On the other, it wants to be inclusive, right? Saying that all moments get their turn. Their moment of day of reckoning when the FBI comes to the block

and shines a laser on your forehead. When the spotlight turns on them alone, everybody now becomes a star. What is actually really interesting in this sort of Pricean allegory of presentism is that presentism, if you think about it deeply, is a form of transcendental solipsism, or perhaps not even transcendental, is a form of solipsism. In the sense that the constitution of time, a lot of presentist constitution,

would always be on your forehead, that laser spotlight on your forehead and not others. Remember, solipsism is actually a double-faced sort of thesis. One, you think that it is me who is the agent, and everyone else is by analogy can be an agent. And two, that the other exists outside of me. It's just, again, by analogy that they exist by virtue of me.

so there is a tissue in solipsism that is quite rife for a skeptical decapitation and a scalping and that would be the analogical sort of reasoning that goes into it with regard to me understanding myself as this enlivened subject and everyone else as zombies or to the other as me, so long as essentially by analogy, they, you know, conform to my intuitions of myself, you know, my own mind.

Christ wants to say that presentism is absolutely is the kernel of what you might call to be Cartesian solipsism either by analogy or not Jose wants to actually say something far deeper, that in fact, every encounter of you with your own consciousness and you with the world is actually a form of temporal constitution.

entirely different sort of temporal constitution. It's just that we often have the habits, and I will talk about these habits, these bad habits, to conflate these modes of temporal constitutions. And hence, we make assumptions about ourselves and the other, world included. So, this would be something like what you might call to be the traditional views of time blocks, right?

Let me share the screen. Sorry. I think I lost that. Okay. Okay. One sec. This is main variations on the block view of time. The first one, what you might call to be Mactagor's A-Series. quality of the manifest image certain sort of quasi-dynamic accumulation of world existence

slices in terms of past present and future non-property-based becoming you know becoming in the metaphysical sense changes the property this is not a non-property This is a non-property-based becoming. We are in the realm of block view. Non-relational property of futurity is replaced by the non-relational property of nowness. You can actually attach not every sort of presentism, but some forms of presentism to this sort of block view. then there would be a second one

most prominently put forward by cd broad there is absolutely not no such a thing as a fusion we cannot talk about time if it does not have both the relation of precedence and the relations of consequences, right? What comes after? In Broad's view, all we have is present and past.

that any sort of intuitions about time and the world is the accumulation of slices within the present sinking back into the past. future doesn't exist because it literally doesn't have any sort of precedence relation to any other sort of slices it's only present and past this is again of the manifest image worldview right

and it is a still it's it's a fully dynamic world view right that we are somehow accustomed to where basically the slices of world existences accumulate from present to the past running off to deep past it's also an animated view of piling bolder slices coming into existence as the receding block of present present is all there is what we call past is as real as present it's just that it is

what you might call to be dynamically receding present. This is a view put forward by Broad and in late 20th century by Thule. There is another block variation of time progression, right? This is what you might call to be these nownesses, of earlier and later than. We are, even though they are, it's represented as slices, but these are not slices. These are fields. Each moment of earlier and than is a field

within a spatiotemporal horizon. These are the scientific image. it's not manifestly not dynamic right in this sort of scenario change cannot be an accumulation of slices but a mere transition in fields of a smithio-temporal horizons that would be the realm of physics prooponents of that sort of view would be either Grunbaum or Irman and other people

now Now, coming back, so we have three views, and Boltzmann wants to deal a fatal blow to all of these views of time, introducing them somehow fundamentally incoherent by the way of their own assumptions. Boltzmann, as you know, is a father of a statistical physics and somehow in an oblique way, information

theory and computation, this would be a Boltzmannian scenario. This is from an essay, that picture is called, what if Boltzmann had a real computer? What would the world look like then, right? Because Boltzmann already actually proposes a very computational problem to the perception of time of time in the intuitive sort of way. So obviously I don't need to go over this. I mean, the theory of gas is quite actually understandable.

It is like a thriller, right? So you have a bottle, an idealized or an ideal isolated system full of colored gas. You open the trap door and then this color gas escapes the bottle, the idealized system. And then it creates a certain sort of equilibrium, distribution of molecules of gas within a broader system, which can call it a meta-ideal system. It looks like, it actually looks like a very,

a thriller movie, right? There is, you already know what might happen at the moment of decision of lifting the tractor or opening the bottle's cap, right? Well, the gas is going to escape. Those of you who are fans of thriller, and espionage movies you can rewind this sort of sequence of events in Boltzmannian sense and still actually say that well you know the reason that the gas escaped it was because of this sort of

actions that made the sort of interventions that were made into this bottle into this idealized system, but it would have happened regardless. Right? This is Boltzmannian idea of a set of appearances which are in need of explanation. Boltzmann doesn't see this as a thriller moving from montage one to montage end but rather as a twist

you see the greatest thrillers always have a twist incorporated within them and what is this twist Boltzmann thinks that this movie, this montage is actually about a plot and a subplot the plot would be, you know, the gas escapes the bottle never comes back into the bottle the subplot is that these dots are molecules of gas within the perspective of the subplot all we have are just collisions

of certain sort of type among the molecules of gas within the subplot nothing actually says about how the plot will unfold. And yet, we are made to believe that the plot will unfold regardless of how the molecules hit one another, how protagonists and antagonists kill each other in this thriller. Right? The plot will always unfold as this. but then Boltzmann realizes, as I said, that there is a twist here.

The twist here is that why is that? And you see, this is like the idea of the entropy of the second law. At least at one version of it in the philosophical canon. that the assumption that there is a low entropy at montage one, at this specific slide, the first one, that there is a low entropy is actually quite conflicting

and incompatible with the subplot. Subplot being molecules hitting each other, conflicting among themselves. The principle of, you know, molecular chaos in Boltzmann's sense. In the sense of molecular chaos, there would be no reason to assume that the beginning of this movie would be a scenario wherein everything is in a state of low entropy.

Everyone is happy together, right? so Boltzmann wants to cast the projection of the intuition of time into these two conflicting scenarios one the realm of prediction of appearances on the level of macro state and the realm of micro-state chaos, molecules hitting one another. The molecules conflicting with one another does not give us one ounce of how this plot might actually unfold.

now that we have casted a problem onto a conflicting scenario onto descriptive levels fundamentally distinguished from one another we see that that intuition that we hold so cherished just withers away now be open to questions just two questions and then I will take it from there yes Joel

joel you might be muted there we go that's better sorry okay not muted anymore um the question is i was trying trying to understand the diagram um because in the diagram the there are no the the separation on one side and the other side there are no molecules on the right side so there's no transfer of energy between two bodies at different temperatures so the entropy there is a question of the transfer of the decrease in pressure which decreases the temperature in relation to the

the walls so it's normally when you do when you normally do that you'd have to take into consideration the transfer or the idealized transfer of energy between one set of molecules at one temperature and another set of molecules at a different temperature because essentially what's happening is there is a transfer between two sets of molecules in that diagram there's you know in the second side of it there's no molecule that diagram is what you might call to be what you see when movie normally is being played, right? In the realm of mere appearances, right? Of course, Boltzmann wants to say that behind this, there is another different sort of

film that's being played. It's just that you are not aware of it. In the sense that first and foremost, think about this, that, okay, we are looking, as I mentioned, a la Boltzmann, that we are looking at this thriller, how it unfolds, right? And the colored gas escapes the bottle and so on and so forth, happy ending of total annihilation, that sort of stuff, right? But then, There is another sort of problem that, look, this sort of movie that you have been watching from as if, you know, playing it from the get go to a certain moment to the end.

He wants to say that, well, this is actually time asymmetrical intuition. It confirms your cherished intuition of time asymmetry, right? Your intuition of time asymmetry, of flow, dynamics of time, is actually being corroborated by how a fact of nature works, right? But then think about this, that if you add a subplot to it, and this subplot would be molecules, and the realm of molecules, all we have is what is called the symmetrical laws of mechanics. that mechanical entities such as molecules or particles of a gas

are only responsive to the laws of mechanics which are symmetrical so then how do you actually corroborate these two sort of different stories how do you reconcile so to speak the symmetrical laws of mechanics at the level of the micro-estate with the asymmetrical appearances or phenomena unfolding at the level of macro-estate. I don't know whether that really answered the question.

The point is that the diagram, what you're doing is you're introducing space into it. So it's more of a diagram. Yes, you see, no, you should always think about the diagram, again, as a further idealization, right? It's not as if it's a box, really, when we are talking about a bottle full of gas. No, it's just a diagram, right? and kind of should let in a little bit of suspension of belief. But yes, I completely understand it. The diagram doesn't actually do, tell the right sort of a story,

but nevertheless, the realist story here is whatever it is. So long as we are talking about a system of gas At the level of macroscopic phenomena The level of mirror appearances If you lift the cap The gas leaves, right? But the thing is that Once you introduce another sort of scenario a subplot, which would be that of Newtonian mechanics, there is absolutely no reason

that molecules conflicting among themselves, hitting one another at constant speed and energy vectors and so on and so forth, will unravel this sort of tragedy, right? It's just that you have to compare them. It's a kind of comparative strategy here between symmetrical laws and asymmetrical appearances, regardless of the diagram. The diagram is mere, what you might call to be, diminution or dwarfing of what is at the stake. Thank you.

Sean. Hey, Reza, great talk as always. I had a quick question for you that might, I hope it's related to this, which is around the question of the thriller. thriller. And I was really interested that you describe thermodynamics as a kind of thriller. And in rereading this chapter, the Some Unsettling Contean News chapter, I was struck at some of the like the intro when you talk about language and not just natural languages, I think, as, you know, with tense sentences and modal vocabularies and what it would be like.

Maybe the answer is like the, the formal logics of thermodynamics would be the answer, but I was wondering if you have encountered any kind of maybe fictional writings, maybe different forms of art that experiment with removing the restrictions that one would find in tensed verbs or modal vocab in different mediums. It would be extremely hard precisely because you can't make a piece of literature betraying the tense language, right? But you can manipulate it, right? You can manipulate it. Isn't it

the whole, what you might call to be legacy of time travel stories from the golden age of science fiction, right? I mean, the first thing that comes to one's mind is Robert Heinlein's All You Zombies, right? All You Zombies is the greatest sci-fi story ever told, in my knowledge at least. I mean, I know that there are so many other good, about the origin of the question itself, right? that time consciousness what was so called inner time consciousness is what i usually call

a vicious transparency of time a very certain sort of opacity about the nature of consciousness but it does not actually just precisely because you are living in this moment of opacity doesn't mean that you cannot initiate a systematic inquiry about the origins of the consciousness, right? Of who you are with relation to the world, with the world. And I mean, so all you zombies, last sentence is that, you know, I know where I have come from.

after this guy has gone through that length of questioning back to its own origin and in that mode of questioning its own origin it has given rise to its own consciousness right because consciousness is truly that sort of moment of opacity where the constituted and the constituting become one right so he says the protagonist of all you zombies he says at the end that I know where I have come from but do you all zombies know where you have come from right that I think is a magnificent sort of a story about time and it's a role in the

constitution of the opacity of the life of consciousness. That consciousness, the totality of consciousness, is never given to a conscious agent. That is a fact, or a philosophical fact, not a scientific one. if that is the case then every time that we reflect about the origin we somehow renew the nature of consciousness in a very sci-fi sort of way we reawaken the life we could have or the consciousness we could have.

We are entering the realm of modal possibilities, right? That to me is, I mean, as I was talking to people, I think that sci-fi, regardless of all the sort of lapses in judgment, in judgment. I think sci-fi literature actually is a magnificent source of way to kind of look into the puzzles of not time really, but the constitution of a self-temporalizing consciousness. Thank you, Reza. I think I'm going to reread that

this weekend for sure it is a great another one another one coming back to Boltzmann I have always suggested this to my students you know the tv series dark Netflix right there is a moment there is a moment that the child actually plays this cup and ball sort of game, right? You know, you put a ball in one cup and then it's miraculously ends up in the other cup, right? And the father asks him after performing this sort of trick, so how did you do that? The child answers, that's a wrong sort of question, but you should have asked when I did that,

right? When? When the intuition of time makes an intervention in the structure of objectivity? That is the question that Boltzmann wants to ask. And that is absolutely the most, I would say from a scientific and also philosophical point of view, the most important humbling in a skeptical sort of way sort of question because it humbles everyone's most cherished ideas about how the world is presented to you or for that matter you are representing the world these are not the facts of nature

representation or presentation, but rather the consequences of temporal constitution. Yes, Carl. Carl, I think you're silent. You have to unmute. oh yeah i can you hear me now yes okay great thank you uh no i think we kind of wrapped back to what i was going to ask about which has to do with alex and amanda's questions and that is assuming that um just to be to the beginning that metaphysics in is a non-starter but skepticism in

has two options right we can end up with sort of skepticism out and we can end up with a problem out. But how do we, when we are sort of sitting there trying to start an argument and to sort of marshal our skepticism, how do we know that we will not end up like Gugias and as you said, kneecap ourselves, right? So the question is sort of how do we, how can we sort of, are there any guarantees that our skepticism will not turn into the greedy version? No, I mean, that is the whole point of skepticism. It literally does not yield you any sort of warranty or guarantee about what might happen. That is why it's a very slippery sort of a slope. And kids who are practicing philosophy should not practice skepticism at home.

right you never know you absolutely never know that is the the main problem of skepticism but you cannot just you cannot just play not play with water just because water is dangerous i mean fire is dangerous right that that would be that would be a non-promethean thesis right essentially a skepticism in is a very promethean thesis and look that there should be a certain sort of control about the unpacking of the poison called or super acid called a skepticism right and of course at any moment everything can go wrong but how do you salvage it when it inevitably does goes wrong

in terms of coherency i would say not consistency of claims but internal coherency of a system you start over in other words yes fair enough i think alex also has a question thank you thank you that's why it's a humbling endeavor right it's a very modest but also extremely ambitious sort of you know uh way to do philosophy i i think that if anything it clarifies what you mean with a critique of critique itself right the yes the incessant possibility and almost

demand to be able to or be prepared to revise yes yes yes and of course it it ultimately it requires a certain sort of meta method to control the the distribution of the poison call the skepticism, right? But then you have to have another method sort of control over it, and ultimately it comes back to the systematization procedure, right? The coherency of the claims that can be done within a system of inquiry. Thank you. you uh yes alex yeah okay so i don't actually know where you're standing on this right now

because i feel like what carl also just said um that this is kind of the main problem that i see with this that like a fear or devaluing of skepticism eating itself so to speak is going to just inherently hold back thought or the development of of intelligence if it is a syso a skepticism in a skepticism out absolutely it will does no but no that the that the even the sort of the devaluing the fear because i don't know if there is it's not a fear skepticism is not a fear skepticism is actually a certain why i'm going to talk about this

skepticism is a certain sort of dark optimism a certain sort of a stoic attitude towards the problem of philosophy i don't know any of you know about the stuck syndrome or paradox no i don't at least so he was this is named after this officer of united states who was uh you know captured at the beginning of the vietnam war right and he was an extremely critical person against the invasion of northern vietnam but nevertheless he got captured and he was tortured every day day in day out and he says

that look there were these sort of people among the ranks higher ranks that every say every day they say that oh you know six months from now is Christmas Christmas we are going to be rescued by United States. The war will be over. And then every Christmas goes in, Christmas goes out. And none of them are actually being rescued. And he says that, look, you have to adopt a fundamental skeptical attitude toward your own existence such that when optimism kicks in you don't take it for granted right it's a very sort of a stoic sort

of attitude i think that epictetus had that sort of attitude with regard to the the modes of inquiry that we have to conduct in in philosophy i don't think that is a right sort of method for every sort of person who might actually try to do embark on philosophy philosophization i'm not saying that it's the the only method as i said at the beginning i said that this is a method that i am trying to come to a full understanding of its import and understand that yes, it is actually a very venerable sort of method, precisely because it somehow deprives

you in a positive sort of way from so many baggage, metaphysical or otherwise, or epistemological, that you have always taken for granted. Right? A critique without a critique of critique is not a critique. Right. But I don't see how this relates to the... So maybe I didn't phrase it right. Please formulate. Please formulate. I'm all here. Your recommendation, yeah, I also want to still make time for Sayak, you know.

So your recommendation, like, what was it? Kids shouldn't play with skepticism at home. This kind of thinking that that's what I think, you know, this holding back from an irresponsible use of it that would lead to too much of the poison. It eats itself. It destabilizes itself. It cuts its own knees, whatever. that this is like it seems like necessarily it's slowing down it seems like necessarily like a repression of thought to me I wouldn't call it repression of thought I would say repression of critique right because if a skepticism is worthy of its own name it should serve

the organon of the critique but the critique is already an inquiry into the conditions of possibilities of us thus and so agents having certain sort of representational and presentational capacities with regard to ourselves and the world so the critique of the critique is really a maturation of the critique in the sense that look even that moment of the critical critical philosophy should not be taken for granted everything is up for eternal inquiry

it is not a regression it is what Husserl would call rook fracking questioning back or regressive questioning With Hossel, there is this magnificent, actually, I don't want to actually glorify Paul Reker, but nevertheless, at the very least, Paul Reker wrote a magnificent essay on Rookfragen, on questioning back, comparing Hossel's method with that of Wittgenstein.

What Husserls understand is that, and that's how Paul Ricoeur explains it, that look, there is absolutely no way that in the course of questioning back, you might arrive at something extra-linguistic, such that you basically entertain the myth of categorical given. Now, everything always going to be linguistic in modes of reflection and inquiry, scraping the surfaces, so on and so forth. It's just that it is a mode of inquiry

that works like an acid that you drop this sort of acid this mode of inquiry into a very solid surface and it creates a hole this hole is a lens for you to look further down then you can actually add another drop of acid, right, called skepticism, to open up, to open up such that you can actually see what motivated you for you to embark on such inquiries about the nature of consciousness,

the world, and so on and so forth. That is the way of, you know, questioning back Rookfragen. It's, at the end of the day, it's the ultimate form of doubt as a form of probability. I know that Adam Berg has talked about this in his book on Boltzmann, Mark, and Husserl. Doubt here is being understood in the sense of depletion and amplification of the sense of objectivity. Translate objectivity here to the articulation

of the relations between the subject and object and subject and the world, right? that to me is is actually a certain sort of philosophical life but obviously this sort of philosophical life however runs at the background of this philosophical life a fundamental form of opacity, which is time consciousness. A manner of givenness, not a givenness in a Szilardian way,

but a manner of givenness, a mode of givenness to which we have come to become conscious in the first place. We can only actually unfold the inquiry through this manner of givenness, although in various ways, right? But nevertheless, there is a certain sort of opacity. Look, this is the fundamental thesis of Wittgenstein and Husserl, that there is an ultimate tension between life and consciousness. The life of consciousness is never given to consciousness.

consciousness has only reflective moments about its own life the totality of the horizon of life of its life is never given and these modes of reflections about the life of consciousness are ultimately methodological instruments of reflection that are under the jurisdiction of epoche, right? Of certain sort of methodological skepticism, bracketing, suspension, so on and so forth. You cannot really reflect about what your

perception is or what your beliefs are by mere natural attitudes or psychologistic attitudes. You have to suspend some of those assumptions such as you can actually dig a deeper hole for yourself. And through this digging a deeper hole, you might actually come out of the hole. And that would be the problem of consciousness. Yes, Morten. Hi, Reza. I'd like to tie the issue of skepticism and agency back to Boltzmann and to try to tie that in more precisely.

when looking at the diagrams of the dispersal of gas once the barrier is removed in those three images that you provided before. Right. That's a thought experiment based on the intention of the scientific community to control nature in order to produce work, which is the steam engine. I don't agree with this.

And the skepticism, I think, comes in with Boltzmann When he's rejecting, for example, he's rejecting or modifying Maxwell's thesis that there is a universal tendency toward degradation. portman actually wants to ultimately say that there is absolutely all such assumption and such conclusions are ultimately false not by virtue of the principles of mechanics but by virtue

of how we project either laws of symmetry to the asymmetry of appearances or the asymmetrical appearances onto the symmetrical. The one that you are mentioning about the control, I mean, Boltzmann doesn't have that sort of thing about a steam engine. Yeah, Gibbs, for example, if we want to think about it, yeah, Gibbs has that sort of thing. But really, Boltzmann understanding of the unfolding of gas and prediction of appearances at the macroscopic level is beholden to what you might call to be a statistical understanding of a system.

At the level of a statistical distribution, all we have are certain sort of velocities with vectors, vectorialized and nothing else. We don't have any sorts of what you might call to be these sort of extra agendas about initial and boundary conditions of the system that earlier people, earlier philosophers of thermodynamics, scientists of thermodynamics have introduced to the system. Boltzmann actually is not by any means part of the canon of the classical thermodynamics. That's why he was called a delirium

in philosophy of physics at the turn of 20th century, precisely because he forgoes with those sort of assumptions. And yet he manages to see that there is actual an incompatibility in these sort of assumptions And there is literally nothing in nature that can corroborate, as a point of facticity, the asymmetrical flow of time or the unfolding of appearances. I'm not sure that either I agree or I understand what you're saying here.

because given the context of the industrial revolution which is why thermodynamics came into being in the first place in order to solve problems of inefficiency in the control by dynamic laws of thermodynamic processes in order to produce work that's the context for all these discussions and i think i think this is a little bit of a historical jump here precisely because uh of course we can we can say in the history of physics or for that matter history of philosophy that there is a constitutive moment in the genesis

of an idea right but the totality of ideas shall never be conflated with one constitutive moment of it right such as the invention of a motor engine and a steam engine and that sort of stuff no i i think that there is a there is far more thing if that is that is the case then i would actually want to rather deflate that sort of idea by saying that, okay, if that is the case, then let's inflate this idea to its ultimate conclusions. If that is the case, then probably everything that we have to do in science is merely a semblance of control over nature,

which is not interesting. It doesn't say anything. I'm not sure because... That would be just, I would say, a very orthodox, not even a good Heideggerian, a very orthodox Heideggerianism. Gestel 101. Well, what I'm saying is that Boltzmann's order principle principle puts the ordering principle oh you mean you mu space ordering principles is has nothing to do with any sort of facticity of nature it actually is a very idealized sort of calculation that is the very origin of what we might call to be information theory it has a zero sort of

connection with facts of nature. Literally mu space, the sort of calculation goes, the relation between the sort of microstates responsible for the dozen so appearances at microstates are not actually have anything to do with facts of nature or appearances for that matter. It's a fundamentally a computational calculation, a very modest kind actually. I'm talking specifically about the way that Boltzmann's order principle revises

the series of pronouncements by clausius carl maxwell and and and and that opens up a portal it does it does but but but really actually the most interesting thing about and that's That's a moment of skepticism on Boltzmann's point, which is what I'm getting at. So the nature of this skepticism is what I'm trying to focus on. Yes. I mean, one of the things, for example, that is really actually interesting is that Gibbs' notion of entropy has energy points, right? Boltzmann takes off energy because energy ultimately makes a certain sort of assumptions about the nature of work and the nature of a system, right?

He takes that energy off the equation. So you ultimately get Boltzmannian equation of entropy, you know, K log W, as opposed to the Gibbsian entropic formulation, which has energy points in it. Right. And part of that has to do with the fact that it's in Gibbs who finally completes the job of constructing a form of mathematics, mathematical geometry, which is capable of accounting for the range of possible futures, which is part of the very capacity for critique that you're discussing.

And it's through Gibbs that someone like Prigogine is able to do the work that he's able to do with that single portal that Boltzmann provides in order to account for self-organizing processes. Yes, in a sense, yes. I might disagree a little bit here and there, but the general claim, yes, I agree with that. So what is it about the skepticism of Boltzmann at that point that aligns with your notion of skepticism as a form of agency here? no skepticism not as a form of agents as a method i i didn't want to say that yeah method

essentially as bolzmanian skepticism uh if we want to call it a skepticism is essentially a skepticism about the income and durability of various scales of descriptions and explanation something that has been transported to basically the whole you know theory of edifice of scientific theorization building scientific theories that we cannot simply smuggle assumptions from one descriptive level to another or for that matter from one explanatory

level to another or worse attribute the wrong level of descriptions or descriptive vocabularies to the wrong sort of described boundaries of a system because because in that smuggling is where basically human intuition does the smuggling without even knowing it. Such as the nature of time may seem, actually. A much longer conversation. And I didn't mean to take up so much time.

No, no, no, absolutely. No, no, all good, all good, all good. Thank you so much. My apologies. I need to go two minutes, not 20 minutes i wanted to say 20 minutes two minutes i need to be absent i will come back in two minutes uh take this time as a refreshment restroom so on and so forth i will reconvene in two minutes could could we make it five if possible five minutes okay you're twisting our arms yes i'm twisting time so i'm going to uh i think we're almost i over prepared for this

let me just share my screen Sepi, let me know when we should start. Sepi, there's something that's wrong with my... Yes, go ahead. So, as I was saying that for some reason, I thought that, you know, we have a lot of time, but time is actually very scarce sort of resources.

Actually, there is a lot of stuff that I cannot actually represent. And so I just jumped into the diagrams I prepared for this, right? The first funky diagram. You know, it's a twist on where is Waldo, where is time, right? Time is everywhere, right? But then how do you actually use time to distinguish yourself, right? Inner time consciousness in a Hosselian sense, which is not about time, really. It's about the temporalization vector,

the self-transcendizing imminence of time that is the very constituting and the constitutive factor of consciousness itself, right? So that would be the slogan, the bane and the bliss of self-consciousness. is that it is drawing to time in the way a moth is perpetually attracted to light. This is something, a metaphor that a friend of mine, Filippo Felizato, gave it to me, which I stole from him. And it is this law of motivation

that defines the very essence of self-consciousness. which is, at the end of the day, the form of intelligence. Now, we went through these diagrams, that diagram, and this diagram. Right. It's, again, another version of Fine Waldo time in the diagram of transcendental hyalomorphism, a la Kant. so it is fitness that for some reason can't believe that time

aka a formal condition of inner sense is only time that we have and in a very specific sort of almost like an immature sort of way, the role of time ends in Kantian Orthodox. I wouldn't call it Kantianism. I would call it Orthodox Kantianism ends with inner sense. So this is the first circle, as you see, is radiating out. That's time for Kant, right?

So the problem of agency, of the transcendental constitution, so to speak, is a problem of mapping representation to an object and a subject. That's actually quite important. representation is not merely certain sort of map that can only be thought with regard to an object. But representation is actually constitutive of also the subject. That is the transcendental constitution by virtue of this bilateral maps to subject and object by way of reference and

reflexivity reflexivity is data of the relation of the representation as an act and as an object to the subject and references representation as an act and object holding thus and so relations with the object. Time plays a massive role here, right, at the background of the possibility of representation as a fundamental moment of transcendental constitution. This is what you might call to be the picture of time radiating out, most famously given by Kant in transcendental aesthetics particularly with regard to discussion

of the inner sense where with regard with you see these squiggly arrows are not actually mean that object is the first order outer appearances or subject is a perceptive self, but rather there is a certain sort of translative or various moments of articulations that allow us to change the representational map to the map of the perceptive self and the first order appearances. And the mediating factor that allows for this sort of instantiation of relationships would be inner sense in Kant.

And the form, the form of inner sense, the condition of possibility, the formal condition of possibility of inner sense to allow for this map to actually take place. to become instantiated is time. Now, when Kant's talk about time, he doesn't really mean time like metaphysical time. He means transcendental ideality of time. Yet I would say that even in its most modest

forms Kantian transcendental ideality of time is contaminated by metaphysical stains of time such that we can talk about past, present, and now, and future as if they were blocks of a slicing of world, slices of world existence in the previous diagram. right so as we move downward from this sort of aesthetic understanding of temporalization as a constitutive moment of subjectification and objectification we find ourselves in a very sort of dynamic view

of temporalization. Again, not to be confused with our cherished, ordinary ideas about time. When I am talking about past, present, future, now, I am, in the vein of yourself, saying simply something like that, that for the lack of better words that we use such designations. Because time is not an ontological unreality, a la MacTaggart, but the reality of consciousness itself,

and hence an authentically irreal component, Right? So we try to unfold that sort of circle radiating, time radiating out to a trifurcating it to this sort of thing to understanding and then, you know, let me zoom on. Understanding, you know, productive imagination, imagination, schematism, reproduction, reproductive imagination,

and then at the middle would be inner sense as a foundation of the inner sex, inner x, x being an object here. That would be intuiting, and then at the other side would be the intuited, the realm of the intuited, the apprehending inner sense, and the outer sense, which would be objects merely in the receptacle of a space. Time here is the engine of synthesis. Think about synthesis as the articulation of X, the object.

This object can be you or something among the furniture of the world. The fact that there is an X here, it means that there is a consciousness, right? So time creates a sort of synthesis. Now, unfold this diagram even further down the line. this is the question of Rookfragen questioning back about the assumptions we hold so dearly about the nature of our subjectivity and objects in the world when we

further dynamize this diagram at the middle we arrive at Brentano-Frighe-Hussell diagram of the role of time in the constitution of consciousness this is called the logic of truth in a Husserlian sense you can for the lack of better word think about it as the logic of signification right remember sorry representation

is only a representation by way of a reference and by way of reflexivity how it holds to an object and how it holds to a subject Now, translate this in an explicated, so to speak, in a Carnapian sense, to a different sort of vocabularies, far more nuanced and sophisticated, to the vocabularies of truth. the semantic content and syntax namely pure forms such as you know formal languages right so whereas Kant told us that time only has a value

or a certain sort of significance with regard to the inner sense, if we truly suspend our intuitions about time, time seems as if it is ever and always present, like in the map of Where Is Waldo. it is not only present in the content it is also present in forms in eidetic insights and by virtue of that it is present in the logic of truth itself

this sort of diagram can only be achieved by the intertwinement of what can be called questioning back or rookfragen and the constitution and the constitutedness of time and its motivations. What time consciousness motivates you to be thus and so agency or to be an agent to begin with. Rookfragen goes downward

and motivation goes upstream. But they are always intertwined across slices or moments of reflections, which we usually call models of consciousness and imagination. Now, the last one. Or maybe actually I should, out of abundance of caution with regard to information, overload, stop, and, you know, tell you that if you have questions and then we take it from that point onwards. So, Sayak.

Hi, Reza. Yeah. So, I was thinking about, like, what we're talking about. Like, I would start, like, I had a few things. Like, the first is, like, metaphysics in, metaphysics out, skepticism in and skepticism out and then we proposed that skepticism in and problem out. But it's also a manner of reading in a way like if you like when you're saying skepticism skepticism in and skepticism out you're like referring to this meta nature of skepticism that you like start doubting you start critiquing the critique of critique like it's meta like it's like nested loops in the terms of code. Yes. But if you if you are thinking like if you think about

it like say like in SISO if I read it like in terms of language and if I just put a punctuation in between let's say like comma so if we read it like this in in the vocabulary with the vocabulary of communication say like when you say like skepticism in and skepticism out it actually leads to like it's not that skepticism begets more skepticism but skepticism is out like something gets in and something is out like communication on walkie talkie or like military communication say and then when you like if you like so i would propose that like and you are also talking about bracketing, right? So the way I would say is like, like the way we, and you are

talking about a thriller movie later, which I'll come to later, but I would suggest then like I would modify like this is the age of modification, right? With AI, with body modification, genetics and all of that. So I would modify SIPO to just sip, said it's not skepticism in and problem out, but skepticism in and then skepticism pauses and then it will be sip like you are taking a sip of water and replenishing yourself yeah that's that's actually a very good way it's essentially if i'm not wrong what you are essentially say that look that a skepticism out once brought under the moment of reflection, like, you know, I'm having my cigarettes and thinking about this, then becomes

a problem, a true positive problem, rather than merely a hazard sort of skepticism as a super acid that cut its own body, right? Dissolved its own body. Yeah, no, absolutely. Reflection here is the most important thing that that literally uh what is really this is hossel's innovative idea that we cannot actually think as i said about the life of consciousness or for that matter the human as an idea without moments of reflections but what happens here is a fundamentally different

sort of hydra of philosophy do you know what it is so if you have a different moments of reflection have different ideas of human how do you articulate the integrity the integration, right? And Hossel calls this eidetic variation, right? Eidetic in the sense that ultimately we can actually arrive at the truth of the human in the sense of philosophical anthropology by way of varying in experiences, in moments of reflective experiences, the ideas of the human, right? Then two instant problems crop up.

One, the first one that has actually made by Hossel in his C manuscripts, which is something like this that, If we take the eidetic variation, moments of reflections about the human seriously, and then we can only procure certain sort of what might call the perspectival knowledge about the essence of the human by way of these sort of sporadic moments of reflections, then historically if we are thinking about the human can we actually talk about one single

sort of human essence right that josell wants to say that this opens the notion of humanity to a fundamental new realm which is called conceptual discontinuities within the realm of the human, right? So that's the first leg of the dilemma. And then there is another one. So if we can only garner insight about the essence of the human through eidetic variations, does this mean that any sort of insight, eidetic insights that we can ever procure about the nature of the human are always supposed to be

negative by variations. This does mean that humanity is depleted from the get-go from any sort of positive essence, and the essence of humanity can only be given negatively by moments of reflection. These are two fundamental Hosselian questions. I have zero answers to these at this point. This is actually my research. Another thing about, again, I was thinking about the Boltzmann diagram that you had shown and like again rereading it like if you're

you're talking about like so the second diagram can you please show the diagram yes yes you're talking about this one no not this one the earlier one the Boltzmann one yes and the next one. Sorry. Yeah, this one. So sure I was talking about this is again like, like I, I would read it as like a bracketing of sorts, like where like, in a perfect condition, in a scientific, like scientifically controlled condition, like the trapdoor is suddenly taken away. But here I would propose like the way you are seeing the controlled nature of skepticism. So instead of like this being a trapdoor which is suddenly taken away or suddenly like it vanishes,

it is something like a say piston which which does not like act in a controlled manner but it happens sporadically. Let's say if like this is this is a piston which can be controlled it's a mechanized thing and it can like suddenly like moves to a position x on this like horizontal plane. And then what happens like there are like innumerable collisions which occur like in that moment of time in that like piece of time. But then the time again changes already sporadically and in a very like like there are two like dimensions I can think of like one is the speed of light and then another is in infinite similarly small time. Say like it's

moves either very slow or very fast. Again, I'm taking two binaries, but they are not binaries. There are always these in-between. But if you think of it not being completely taken away, but controlled it, if you can apply the other, the first diagram to this sort of representation. So then also, I think it can be modified that way. That when you are taking it away, not like a thriller movie, say, because a thriller movie again, like movie continues, like progresses linearly, like one montage leads to the other. And also through the persistence of vision and memories and the interconnectedness of it, we make that create that meaning through

reflection and through like, like we come to embody like some essence of the characters of the thriller movie in a way but at a distance which like here like through your molecules you are saying that and through your like later where's time where's waldo picture that time is represented by each of these molecules and that that each of these molecules actually they they have this time asymmetry they don't actually understand time i mean the same way they molecules J. But the asymmetry is inherent because like if you're again like. be that would be a kind of contradiction to newtonian laws of mechanics because they really

don't have a symmetry right that's the whole point of that but uh uh uh but the asymmetry is inherent because like if you're again like with the modification of the like trapdoor to sort of like a mechanical like movable like piston say sort of like I can think of the piston as the image of what like I'm trying to say here. So in that sense like this constant, like this movement, like I think this time, like the way time moves,

like is is like positioned according to the piston, like the way the time the trap door moves away. Yes, yes, yes. I mean, I don't want to take too much time on this, but I think that this is already factored in Boltzmann's idea, right? So Boltzmann idea is actually quite very simple, right? This is the fact of appearances, what we are seeing here. This is how it is moving now, no matter how much you bang on your head, saying that this is not really the case. Now, this is the order of prediction of appearances

in a system of gas, right? everything has a place in the grand tragedy, which is called entropy, right? But the thing is, for Boltzmann, he also, when he goes from the microstate appearances to microstate probabilities, he doesn't have this trapdoor anymore. The trapdoor never opens or closes. nothing is actually there it would be just molecular chaos that is actually the concept molecular chaos the principle of molecular chaos

and the molecular chaos literally doesn't tell us no matter how much we rewind and forward this movie how the movie should actually unfold in its plot, right? It's undetermined. It's undetermined. And the thing is that Boltzmann, once criticized by Poincaré and a couple of other scientists in the magazine Nature, he noticed that Jesus Christ there is something amiss here

there is a fundamental plot hole that the fact that you are saying in the canon of a statistical physics that no matter how many number of real collisions happen in the realm of the molecule or particles of gas will lead to does and so appearances at the level of a bottle opens up and the gas escapes that is actually a fundamental bias of human intuition it really that intuition has no zero, at the very least,

place in scientific discourse, in the discourse of objectivity. Whether about the scientific image, that is the greatest understanding of Boltzmann, whether about the scientific image or the manifest image, the manifest image Nothing here supports the manifest image. Science actually does not corroborate manifest image. So Boltzmann was, as I mentioned, a certain sort of secret student of Brentano

and a great reader of Edmund Possell. ultimately i think that if we are actually going to be thinking about boltzmann's enigma or puzzle we should understand it in a very hosselian sort of way that physics does not explain away the realm of phenomenon it merely constructs another layer of phenomena over it. It's kind of like Kant's amphiboly of appearances. Like when Kant talks about the amphiboly of appearances and you scrape the appearances in the name of science

in favor of the nomina. But all you can actually dig into is further appearances, right? So, yes, the last diagram, and then we are going to open it up to questions and discussions. This is, you know, that everything that I have said in that chapter, I apologize. It was both shit about a view from nowhere. It was fundamentally confused. precisely because I took every form of time consciousness as a metaphysical register of time.

That is actually a very sort of bad philosophical assumption. And hence, I created a very rushed sort of conclusion about the view from Noven. the view from Noven is actually time as the constituting and the constitutive factor of consciousness it's just that we cannot call it time Husserl that's why Husserl calls it inner time consciousness everything that holds for inner time consciousness is not of metaphysical properties of time or even time but rather sort of mode of givenness

which is what you might call to be the engine and the lubricant motivating factor of consciousness itself. So in Husserl's classical idea, inner time consciousness unfolds in two parallel sort of lines, what you can call imagination, laws of parallelism between imagination and perception, a self-transcending imminent object and object of transcendent transcendental hyalomorphism, a la Kant. You see, one of the greatest discoveries of Husserl and phenomenology as a skeptical method

in the realm of appearances themselves is that imagination does not serve perception. imagination is deprived from its what you might call to be synthetic function synthetic transcendental function at the service of perception in Hossel's sense imagination actually is the most authentic form of presentation so when we are thinking about perception we are thinking about the fulfillment of the perception of an object, right? You know, the Solares in pink cube, we see it, the sort of sides and faces

and the colors that facing us. And yet we say that this is a cube as the intuitive object by anticipating the absent sides of the sort of, you know, object, right? This is called a spiel realm, room to play, room to move, right? It's fundamentally an object that is absent, but it's anticipated within the realm of perception, of perceptual object. but of course this creates a massive sort of problems particularly as you have seen it in

you know in AI today for example there are certain sort of impossible objects right like a knot like there are these knots that that they have this sort of real configuration like this but But then you want to say that, well, this knot that I am seeing have anticipating it in perceptual realm, that there would be certain sort of similar by association and continuities of the horizon of this sort of associations back at the side of this knot. That this knot will be this. But look, this knot will be like that at the back.

It has nothing to do with frontal view. So the Espielraum would be a fundamentally sort of the room to play. The absent facade of the object would be essentially an object of doubt and fundamental probability, right? But nevertheless, all perceptual objects of this sort or other sorts have a certain sort of what Hosef calls fulfillment principle. In the sense that you can't actually talk about the perceptual object without anticipating its absent facades, its absent facets, right?

So you put that essentially all perceptual objects are constructed based on a form of trustworthiness. This trustworthiness is not certainty, but it's an object of doubt itself, a doubt that is being controlled in the sense of probabilization, probabilities in Boltzmannian sense. imagination however for Husserl has nothing to do whatsoever with perceptual realm precisely because imagination doesn't take orders from perception you see

in pure fantasy all fantasies mere fantasies fantasying gags and phantasmata are a species of as-if thoughts. Do you know what as-if thoughts are? Hans Weyhenger, who was a great scholar of Kant and, by definition, influenced Hossell and Carnap down the line, introduces as-if as real fictions, fictions that don't try to compete with reality but are authentic objects of their own logical sense in the sense that

imagination when it is of the pure mere fantasy it is not as if we are mistaking it with a perceptual object. It is always a fantasy to us, because if we are mistaking it with a perceptual object, then we are entering a nasty real, which is called hallucination, delusions, or positively, in a salient sense, perceptual imagination. But nevertheless, imagination has transitively the consciousness of the absence of the object. Its presentness is always carries over throughout the act of construction of imagination, right?

So it is a double consciousness in a way, in the sense that one, I am consciousness of this unicorn that I am seeing, but I am also consciousness transitively that it is not really an object that is presented to me right now, here and now. I am aware of its absence throughout, and hence it becomes a double consciousness. This form of double consciousness, according to a cell is the greatest bane and the greatest bliss of consciousness a consciousness is only a consciousness because it can imagine and once it imagined it creates a split in its order of self-consciousness

this split is called the headless temporalization This is not my word. Headless temporalization is a term coined by Nicholas de Warren. And it simply means headless by virtue of it being bereft of an ever-renewing, stabilizing access of temporalization. Or then it calls, it is in terms of headless temporalization that the fluctuating givenness of the imaginary object, and therefore in truth a quasi-object, is constituted. An imaginary object is originally constituted in retential

modification and potential indeterminateness without passing through or emerging from the wellspring of an original impression, a presentation, like as if really an object present to me. Imagine that imagination is headless because it lacks presence. It only has far future and far past, far pretensions and far retentions. and precisely through that sort of lack and the consciousness of that lack that absence is I wouldn't call it lack an absence non-presence imagination unfolds

a dynasty of problem within consciousness itself some are negative and some are fundamentally positive. First and foremost, what imagination does, according to a cell, is that it operates against the backdrop of something called fundamental type. fundamental type are kind of like schemas in Kant right in the act of imagination but in so far as in Hosell's imagination doesn't serve any sort of transcendental function

it is an autonomous function types are not should not be understood as schemas it would be completely misguided to uh you know attribute types to schema so fundamental types is something like this that it is only because we grasp the world as a horizon of existence at the level of simple experience that we can step back from particular experiential content at the level of active judgments and articulate formalized judgments according to ourselves

with empty places standing in for some x with some properties or other out in the world in other words we can take up an arbitrary stance toward the content of judgment only if we first grasp the general shape of all possible content at the level of simple experience. What can be inserted is still not completely arbitrary, rather the presupposition, never made completely explicit remains that this something which is introduced must be precisely an existent which fits into the unity of experience correlatively into the unity of the world

understood as a totality of objects of experience in general therefore not merely into the unity of what is actually experience, but also of all imaginable experiences. Think about this. The fundamental type is a certain sort of presupposition about the nature of transcendental constitution, particularly transcendental time constitution. that within a system of experience, whatever you might actually say, spring forth from a unitary horizon

of temporalization, that all objects are objects precisely because they are sharing the unity of this temporal horizon. Now, the consequence of this assumption is quite severe. Precisely, if anything that can be called existent in logical form be brought under the existential qualification symbol, is precisely its existent in the sense that this existent, the form of this existence can be decoupled from the horizon itself, the backdrop.

Meaning that you can have the form of the existence while suspending the content of that which exists. hence imagination motivates first and foremost the formal languages what are formal languages in in the word of Katarina de Telnavais formal languages are called formal languages precisely because we are capable of de-semantifying namely suspending the content of a form such that later on we can apply that logical form to a different context that's what makes formal languages such powerful tools right

all based on this assumptions right given to us by the autonomy of the imaginary phantasing and phantasmata. But imagination creates a fundamental tension within the edifice of consciousness. So imagination is really, by virtue of being derived from inner time consciousness, is the view from nowhere. is the view from nowhere not only by the way of its origins

in our time consciousness that knows nothing of time in a metaphysical sense but also by virtue of its consequences and gives rise to forms forms which have no nothing literally no knowledge not negatively but a willful ignorance of the contents of objects and existence in time. And hence, there are forms, right? So imagination would give rise to the view from nowhere precisely because of this. But yet, imagination within the order of consciousness creates a fundamental tension

with the perceptual ego. And hence, imagination becomes a source of fundamental alienation, negative and positive. You see, the perceptual ego is revolved around a certain sort of temporalization, which requires the presence of an actual object of perception, which we call the positiveness of the object, right? and everything revolves around it ultimately this leads to a form of ego as freud and joselle both students of brentano would have it a form of ego that when it looks into the world

it sees its own projection into the world like narcissus and the world projects back right that this would be that diagram, this world. It becomes a this world, only this world, not other worlds. Within the realm of the perceptual ego, you only have one world, not others. Because that world is actually the consequence of your own perceptual ego. So the present moment of positiveness, co-constitution, right? Whereas imagination actually rips and decapitates the perceptual ego.

It creates fundamental galvanizations in the order of consciousness. First, as I said, by virtue of introducing the possibility of forms, logical forms, as ifs, as a conscious, double consciousness of absence, right? An object that doesn't have a present, but only remote retentions and remote pretensions. and then by virtue of all this, by virtue of decapitating the hydra, which is the perceptual ego,

it allows for us entertaining the possibility of other worlds and not just this world, a world that is not any more habituated or made out of the habituation of the cherished intuitions of the perceptual ego. it introduces the other as a condition of possibility of self-recognition in a very opaque abstract sense it is not yet concretized it is not historical by any means

it is at a very sort of low profile that ought to be articulated, right? And then if you think about this diagram as a whole you see we came as a skepticism in but now new problems are multiplying Thank you very much. I'm ready to take the questions.

Did you unmute yourself? yeah um just silent i'm i'm mute now yes um i was born as a mute um yes it's been a while coming the update on the uh time chapter been waiting quite four years now maybe or something since the reading group yeah i mean look i mean like literally i just generally think that you know if you are writing a book you should at least give it probably i'm immaturely talking about the book you should at least give it 10 years for going and destroying the entirety of that book

and that's that's that's what why i call philosophy you know to destroy your own book is an accomplishment i think you described it as manure before yes i know um yeah thanks for just about when i thought i had the somewhat basic understanding of the chapter you come and destroy all of it and perhaps the understanding of everything really um yeah the the question was kind of from earlier on it wasn't really a question but it was kind of like an observation on the uh the diagram of the gas particles as a like dumb skeptic teenager i always looked at the particles and kind of thought so we're being

taught this is always what it tends towards but what if the particles just randomly moved around and happened to stay in the same place and didn't you know move through the thing but this seems at least that would be the that would be the subplot that would be the symmetrical laws of mechanics that would be the happy wall though uh when the subplot goes wrong I was thinking a good thriller when you know lots of little elements combine and make everything else go to shit but yeah. There is this really insinuating philosophical thesis in Boltzmann. I think I I don't know sure how I formulated in that chapter.

he wants to say that look if you frame the problem this sort of way as this sort of movie then obviously everything else unfold as pure chaos right like the reason that we see entropy as dissipation of all universe is because we have created a bad frame of reference ultimately according to Boltzmann later Boltzmann and that that is actually quite I always compare it to the movie counselor you know Ridley Scott you know when when the counselor talks to the head of the cartel and he tells him

that you are a man. He said, look, didn't you say that I have an opportunity? He said that no. I meant you are a man that you have made your choices and decisions. You have created a world around yourself. And once you die, the world around you die as well. Extinction is a concept no resignation can encompass. there was also one other thing because um in in the introduction to the phenomenology there's a quote about skepticism like it's a short paragraph but it kind of puts my thoughts better than i

could probably put it at the moment so i kind of just wanted to read it out and was wondering if you'd agree if it uh corresponds to your your own ideas that you've put forward today uh can you can you can you talk a little bit more about you want me to talk a little bit more yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's that's why it has been a while um yeah i'm i'm just kind of i haven't been in a philosophical discussion on here for quite a while no not about yourself about the talk about the idea that you have i know who you are i don't need more information i have um i think some ideas I think it was kind of like what what motivated you to arrive at those sort of ideas right that's

that's philosophical question um you're putting me on you're putting me on the spot a bit here um I've uh yeah I was more describing I haven't been talking about philosophy so I feel very bad at grounding whatever i'm saying at the moment um i think it was interesting the idea you put forth about boltzman believing in this sort of fundamental molecular chaos like undergirding things and the the idea of the micro states and the macro states is kind of just an idealized form but one one that's quite powerful because you kind of of can abstract from things in a way where you're just talking about the relations that would be

that would be middle balsam later balsam changes fundamentally i mean there is a reason that he committed suicide right people usually have associated this with a certain sort of unfulfilled life, right? I know, I said that, you know, Husserl thinks of imagination as pure frustration, as an authentic, positive act, right? But you cannot actually build a whole world out of pure frustrations, can you, right? That will be Boltzmann. And Boltzmann, later life, it wasn't as if molecular chaos is the actual thing, right?

But it dawned on him that first and foremost, he cannot commensurate that the story about molecular chaos with the asymmetry of time flow in the order of mere appearances in that diagram, right? But there was another sort of highly, you know, charged sort of problem that I don't think that Boltzmann ever actually managed to answer. He tried to do it by way of thought experiments and hypotheses. I think Adam, Adam Berg, my friend, has already talked at Foreign Object about this problem.

It is a thought experiment which is called opening the drawer experiment. It's a pre-Schrodinger sort of thought experiment, right? And he only alludes to this thought experiment in his Lerr Subrentano. Drawing of a thought experiment runs in various sort of ways. you put an object in a drawer then you close it right then you open it if the object is in the drawer Boltzmann would say that look any idiot who question the existence of a physical object

the existence of after you open the drawer and this bar of soap is in the drawer that is actually shows that you're wrong but then Boltzmann understands the nature of the problem again that it's merely a pragmatist form of truth it's not really truth right just because no matter how many times you open the drawer and you find the bar of soap in it, after you put that same bar of soap in it, doesn't mean anything. Essentially, Boltzmann translates this at the end of his life to a very different sort of a story. That there is a divergent sort of, what you might call to be

divergence between the story about the persistence of a physical object and the persistence of appearances. Just because you see a bar of soap in the drawer after it's being opened doesn't mean that there is a bar of soap in the drawer and vice versa. But more importantly, a fundamental really acidic sort of skepticism infects Boltzmann's mind at the end of his life. What if? If we change the order of appearances

by reordering temporalization, the order of temporalization, think about this. You know that in Greek mythology, we have a river called Leti, right? The river of forgetfulness. It is the anti-Heroclan River, right? It's against the river of becoming. Imagine that you put something into the river of Leti, namely the river of forgetfulness. to an observer. It appears as if you have introduced an object into this river to destroyer,

but as a matter of fact, you were removing something from it. so that's Boltzmannian orthodox Boltzmannian story about molecular chaos suddenly ramifies into these various forms of highly charged skepticism which are actually need are in need of explanation, scientific explanation. And Boltzmann cannot, literally cannot deal with the consequences of his own position. Do you still

subscribe to the time is mind thesis? No, no, no, absolutely not. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, I think that that was a very, very, that's why i did not actually read anything from that part of intelligence spirit that is actually i think it's quite immature philosophically i do not want to subscribe it yes i want to entertain a variation of that but without the whole jazz right it i i think that that's that was fundamentally an immature sort of thesis in intelligence and spirit i think what i took away from it here that the update is something like mind is a sort of structuring of time but also the other way around

that time is kind of a structuring of mind yes yes the opacity the opacity the vicious what i you know yesterday i actually finished my class uh for the new center it's the vicious transparency of time with with uh with a nod to without entertaining any of that sort of naturalization or naturalizing tendencies that Metzinger has, but literally that when we are talking about transparency, we are also talking about a very special form of opacity or darkness, right? That is constitutive of consciousness and mind. Mind, I think that, yes, I generally do now,

I see it, the reason always is pregnant in a renaissance sense of pregnancy with its own unconscious, a certain special form of manner of givenness, and hence an opacity that from one side can be understood as a bane as a curse and from another sort of angle it can be understood as a moment of renewal of consciousness of its own moments of reflection constitutive reflections and hence a bliss so so with curses and blessings to the the idea that we have a

an imagination that we can kind of uh take as something that's maybe real but also the double consciousness of that like you were describing that we're also conscious that it's an alienation at the same time. Yes, yes, yes. I think that this is what I wanted to say, that that moment of alienation, double consciousness, when consciousness sees itself outside of the habits of perceptual ego, is a moment that we are motivated to in fact launch a skeptical apparatus. right Martin

oh I think Martin uh it's such a rich talk Reza um thank you and it very much impinges on on um a long-scale project of mine trying to construct a genealogy backwards in time, no pun intended, from Brigagene and Bohm. Bohm, yes. I mean, particularly Bohm is magnificent, magnificent.

So it seems that you're hinting at a construction of rational skepticism that is capable of cognizing possible alternative futures. and most importantly uh a path toward the concretization of recognition of the other yes right yes and i think that's part and parcel with that and and so it resonates with the geometry of phase space as opposed to the state space which was the attempt of calculus

to try to take into account things like entropy which it was not capable of doing and which Boltzmann represents the moment of the precipice beyond which one can no longer go any further yes it's real and and so that's why I'm wondering whether you've ever read Poincaré's essay on mathematical discovery yes yes I mean yes and it seems to me that this this essay pulls together a number of the different threads that you're getting at here. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I mean, I think I mentioned Poincaré. Boltzmann was a set pass with regard to his thesis until Poincaré gave that sort of analysis.

So this is what I want to introduce by way of hinting at what I've been up to. So that essay is the first essay by a scientist taking seriously the possibility of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, where order can emerge spontaneously. And he does that by reference to the atoms, not of Democritus, but of... I'm missing the blanking on the Stoics name. Not Epictetus.

Excuse me? Not Epictetus. No. The precursor to Lucretius. And Lucretius will do good. Okay, okay, okay, okay. Okay, so in that essay, he describes thoughts like Lucretius's atoms attached to walls, and then a moment of illumination, which is the aha moment. These atoms, and by implication, the walls themselves, disintegrate and then reform into new forms at a higher level of organization. Do you see the connection between this and reinterpretation of Plato's cave?

Yeah. Recoding of the appearances. Right. But this is an inversion of it. It does not buy into the transcendental grounds and therefore the forms of Plato. So what's interesting is that I see this as the moment where Poincaré demonstrates the influence of his, of the person he had been mentoring for decades, who's Henri Bergson. I don't know if you know this, but as a Lissé student. No, no. I mean, I know a number of, for example, Poncares, you know, influences that would be, you know, conventionalism, you know, Hogan Dengler, right?

Yeah. And other kind of people. But no, no, I'm not familiar. Yeah, well, let me just finish this line of thought. Um, so, um, and, and furthermore, he makes an analogy of this notion of emergent properties and associating it specifically with entropy here to the creative, intuitive process of discovery, which enables aha moments to occur. So he's making an analogy between non-equilibrium thermodynamics, which is what becomes the coin of the realm by the 1960s, right? And emergent cognition. So he's already doing this in an essay written in 1907. Okay. And this...

Would you be able to put the name of... Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to write my email. So send me an email and I'll send you the information. Absolutely. Also, if you can put it in the chat box for everyone to see, just a name so we can search it out. Well, anyway, so Berkson was, at least, when Berkson was a Lysée student, he won the mathematics prize for the state of France, and his reward was getting to meet Poincaré, and Poincaré mentored him ever since. Berkson was a genius mathematician.

I mean, aside from whatever else you think of him. And, you know, so this essay is a really important essay, because what he's describing for his aha moment, for this moment of illumination is when he put very disparate realms of mathematics and geometry together particularly ensembles and uh n-dimensional manifolds of remun to what becomes for gibbs phase space which is the only mathematics that could take into account um um um

entropic processes through time rather than in terms of infinite series of states which is the legacy of calculus yes yes so and this enables this is what enables prigogine to do his work on non-equilibrium thermodynamics and win when the nobel prize and and all of that so if you are martin if you are interested in that i think that uh i think adam has actually given the talk yeah I was just interacting with him as well. Yeah. But there's another figure that I also mentioned to Adam, and that is Husserl's mathematics teacher who got to Husserl before Brantano did. And that was Leopold Kroniker.

I have no idea about this. And Leopold Kroniker was the patriarch or progenitor of intuitionist mathematics. And what he does is basically dismantle all of mathematics, particularly with respect to the legacy of calculus, and reduce mathematics to integers and the continuum. Right, right. And demonstrates how one could construct mathematics simply from the phenomenology of the continuum by which two emerges out of one. And the time that separates the lag of time from one to two.

I have some comments about what we can come back to. yeah yeah but what intuitionism and particularly ourselves contribution and i think there are there some connections between ourselves and for example their legacy of both intuitionism and intuitionistic logic not to be confused with one another yeah and they're very yeah and hustle but hustle's phenomenological continuum i think comes out of kronecker i see i had no idea about this i had no idea further yeah furthermore um furthermore um poncray was very much enamored if not bought in lock stock and barrel to use a bad metaphor uh of the intuitionist project

but it's clear to me that phase space what eventually becomes phase space is the shift from a phenomenological continuum to an empirical continuum. I see, I see, I see, I see. And this enables a whole school of science. And so I'm wondering why aren't you mentioning Berkson in this context? No, I mean, as I mentioned early on, I think I did mention that this is a very vast sort of continent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That would be any sort of way that I actually unpack it unwisely, I will be in the realm of computational explosion, right?

It would be Bergson, then it would be Heidegger, that would be this, that would be that. You know, I have to take my, you know, steps. But just to let you know that given my current project, I would love to be able to carry on a further conversation with you. Absolutely, absolutely. And there's a lot more that I would like to say here, but let me just let other people go. I'll cherish it. Soros, my dear friend. I'll type in my email. Sure, absolutely. Soros John. Hi, Reza. Can you hear me? Yes, of course. Thank you. I have to say, I'm very excited to talk to you. You are one of my favorite philosophers already.

but uh i have two questions maybe they're not connected but uh first one uh how do you define chaos uh i mean is chaos hyper chaos or isn't hyper chaos a tautology so this is my first question do you want to go separately because the yes yes yes yes let's go uh with that one so when When Boltzmann called molecular chaos, there is a tradition of phenomenological understanding in the realm of psychology about the notion of chaos before even Boltzmann touches it. And chaos is actually very psychological in the German sense of psychology, before psychology

actually was born as a science or discipline, that chaos, think about this. So traditionally, at least in Brentonian sense, chaos is being understood as the conflict between far retentions and far pretensions. Now, you cannot translate retentions to remembrances and pretensions to anticipations. There are essentially intertwinements of modes of time, inner time consciousness.

The fact that they are considered to be chaotic is precisely because there is no present between them. That they haphazardly, you know, conflict and create further remembrances might be completely erroneous as in terms of delusions or anticipations in the sense of, you know, what you might call to be in the sense of pattern recognition, wrong sort of patterns, right? So Boltzmann introduced the word chaos, molecular chaos, particularly in the sense of a certain sort of haphazardness, in the sense that the history

of the trajectory, or namely the properties of a particle, are undecided. Look, Gibbs understand the properties of a particle that is in a state of conflict colliding with other particles by way of certain sort of histories that you can actually trace, right, in an empirical sense by way of energy points and so on and so forth. Whereas Boltzmann brackets in a very Hosselian sort of way, the history or the historicity of the evolution of a particle in collision

with other particles, which is the idea of chaos in the sense that all we have is a speed, namely the constant velocity or accelerating velocity of a particle in a vector space. and momentum of that particle these information actually don't say anything empirically to you about where this particle is coming from right so essentially boston wants to start it doesn't tell you anything about where these particles are coming from i get it in the

grand sense of historicity of evolution of dynamism or even or even genealogy yes so essentially the idea of chaos here is this idea that you know a particle which is an encapsulation of a certain sort of bracketed information about the dynamic system, bracketed historicity, can collide with another particle, and regardless of where they have come from, it will result this sort of consequences, right? This is the idea of chaos in Boltzmann. Regardless of where the

particles are coming from in the sense of mathematical physical, you know, historicity or genealogy, this will happen if thus and so particles collide. That's the idea of chaos. That's wonderful. I couldn't have imagined your answer, I have to say. And I guess if I can go to the second question. I know there's a very huge leap from where you're standing right now, considering what you were saying, to the next point, which is you talked about fundamental time i guess so fundament yes fundamental time as i said that time here

when we are talking about fundamental time time is only a place for their name for the lack of better words perhaps placement replacement for a placeholder a placeholder a placeholder uh uh hossel never actually talks about time but rather inner time consciousness inner time consciousness inner time consciousness actually is not time it is as i said a certain sort of temporalization that constituted the consciousness and the consciousness also being constituted by virtue of that and adamberg actually his book has a great metaphor for it. Dan Zahavi, I know that also,

he has a great metaphor for it. This fundamental time, which is absolutely not time in any sort of metaphysical or empirical epistemic sort of way, can be relativized or analogized with regard to this sort of metaphor that imagine that you are in a train yesterday I was talking about this we don't call it Orient Express because it's politically wrong these days we call it Prometheus Express this train is called Prometheus Express right and then you are seeing the scenery you are you're a passenger and as you are you know

moments of falling asleep by virtue of the white noise of the train. And then you wake up and you see these sceneries, these snapshots throughout the window of the train. The scenery makes you conscious of you being a passenger, moving at constant speed, right? That would be the constituting, sorry, the constituted, the constituted. But imagine that you could adopt an outside perspective of yourself in this simile or metaphor of a train ride,

where the train is actually you, your consciousness, moving at constant speed and considering that sort of scenario for you. Okay. I see. And, and, uh, what i don't know if this is even uh another jump but uh i i was thinking about i don't know is the implications this has for the idea of the human you see because uh from a kantian

point of view it has massive sort of implications okay so thanks god because uh because i i i'm sure there is a there is a link here you see from this kind of uh epistemological analysis which uh you uh give in your work and then there's this idea of some very, I have to say, dizzying concept of time you have in one of your works. And then there is this idea of the human and how to, I don't know how to say it, how to go beyond it, you see.

Right. So it's a kind of a time travel. We need some concept of a time travel instead of time in a transcendental sense sense of the term. And as you say, this is, I guess this is where we come to the idea that whenever you're trying to explain consciousness, you're already engineering consciousness. Yes. You're implicated in the shed of consciousness, right? You're implicated in the plot. Of course. Yes, yes, exactly. And this is a loop I like to, I don't know, think about. But what's wrong with all these philosophers wanting to get out of this loop? I mean,

where the hell are you going? This is the best place to be, huh? It's kind of a vortex. precisely because it's a great loop precisely because of you as i said if it is if you take this loop for granted yes it then it becomes a circle of hell in dante's sort of way you know pasolini circle of blood and sickle of shit right but if you actually introduce in a controlled sort manner prodding this loop by means of a skeptical disturbances in the loop, then this loop starts to unfold and becomes renegotiated, right? Okay. That would be philosophy itself. This is genius.

Okay. This is okay. But how exactly? This is my question. I mean, what are the, I don't know, these, we need, we need tools, huh? We need tools for that. Yes. How are we going to invent them? Well, I think the question of invention, yes, is a very scary question. I would say that I think that we have, I mean, that would be, I would say that first and foremost is a philosophical sort of thing about the means of inventing new philosophical tools to inquire back, to inquire back. but also I don't want to I don't want any of you actually take this

as Reza said that oh shit that is pro technology and this and technocrat but I think that the means of inventions are now being exteriorized right by virtue of technology by virtue of AI. I mean, this is the critical question. Is it only the means which are being exteriorized or even the end? The means and the mode of reflection. And that is a very frightening prospect precisely because- Very frightening because even if you expand this idea, which is wonderful, which of exteriorization to the ends and to the agents of the process.

I mean, well, I'm not going to talk about the end game of this, you know, exteriorization, because that would be a fundamental abolishment of the human as we now know it. Isn't that a scary? That's my final question. Yes, but philosophy is not peddling emotions. Philosophy should not peddle emotions. It is scary from a psychologist's point of view. Yes, yes. Again, if I ask this, it's because I want to just go beyond that, you see. No, I would say that it is absolutely a frightening prospect. And it is, I wouldn't call it inevitability, but it is a progressive possibility.

And sooner or later, the wager of Foucault would be on the table. The face of the human will be erased like a portrait drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. that is not the abolishment of the essence of humanity, but rather the modes, it's a specific temporalized mode of existence. And to be honest with you, I think philosophy has always tried to

abolish the specific mode of existence. Like for example, like for example, I used to read a lot spinoza okay so uh i'm not going to go into detail about the laws and spinoza and stuff but but as you know it's one kind of experimentation in this field maybe i'm not saying it's a very good one but maybe that's uh what he's feeling uh somehow he does but but at the same time that the one thing he fails to explain is temporality, don't you think so? Yeah, I mean, yes, I think that, I mean, I don't want to make this chimerization ad infinitum in the history of philosophy, but I

would say that I would be much more happier if there was a chimera called Nietzsche-Espinoza, right yes that would be my uh sort of jam right uh a philosophy truly a philosophical god yes yes and philosophy is not in the business of following gods we are in the business of making ones that's what philosophy is that was Nietzschean by the way Yes, absolutely so. Anything that has come good out of philosophy is by virtue of thinking philosophy after the death of God. Plato had it actually before Nietzsche in Philebus, that the good begins with the death of God.

Absolutely. Even Socrates, the philosophers of one. Socrates, by Socrates, I mean. Who just starts killing the gods. Yes, yes. You know, I mean, this is quite actually famous. Rosemary Desjardins. I don't know if you remember, you were just talking about the idea of monotheism and you referred to the story of Abraham. Of Abraham. Yes, yes, yes. breaking down the dying abraham is a philosopher because he understands the meaning of idolatry right that you see it's just that monotheism didn't have enough spine to do the job only philosophy has not religion

of course. Philosophy is truly the organ of iconoclasm, breaking all idols one by one. Desertification. Yeah, something like that. So two more questions. I think it's four o'clock. I'm hungry. I need to go and eat something. But two more questions. Thank you very much. Absolutely. Oh, thank you, Martin.

Oh, Martin has left. I'm going to save this reference for myself. He went into the drawer. Yes, I mean, look, not everyone is made for philosophical marathons. I have a more out there question, if no one else kind of has any of the moment. but I feel like I've already taken up a lot of the question space. So rather someone else. You can ask one simple question. It was mostly about, I suppose this made me think a bit about stable diffusion

because, I mean, it's kind of... I see that Keith Tilford is here. I didn't see him arriving. That is not my business to answer such questions. I don't get paid to answer such questions. Keith has a lot of sort of research and this sort of realm. Actually, he did give a magnificent talk at CalArts. I think it was a week ago. Is he or if you want to ask him, ask him. I don't mind waiting for that. I just realized it's not a simple question. after making it but um i suppose just the on the the base level the interestingness of it is that

um you know it's an algorithm that kind of adds or tries to make data more noisy and then reconstruct it uh again and so it kind of made me think a bit about the idea of trying to uh construct phenomenal kind of interpretations out of a more chaotic like micro states this is again as I said this is not something that I have actually have any sort of you know well-researched ideas about, but I mean, from my point of view, I mean, Keith might actually say something else,

but I mean, majority of these sort of disabled diffusions work by way of what is called the curse of dimensionality, right? This is actually a problem put forward by Hume. i actually have written something about this maybe i should actually get it that there was a paper we discussed ages ago the curses and blessings of dimensionality yes yes so hume in three times uh also in uh arguments against miracles put forward an idea of imagination that works in terms of vivacitation,

what he calls vivacity of ideas, that ultimately ideas, whatever you might call them, are decompositions of certain sort of beliefs or apparatus of judgments into lower dimensional data, distributed along different scales of faculties of mind. That's quite actually fundamentally interesting, human idea. I know that there is this book that fundamentally goes into this. Let me see if I can find it for you for moving forward with this.

It's called, sorry, one second. No, I don't have it. I should have it here somewhere. Oh yes. No, no, sorry, sorry. No, I don't have it. I will find it, send it to you and if Sepide can actually do a, you know,

see seeing all of us I can actually find it and so this is actually a very fantastic work precisely because it analyzes human form of skepticism and human form of skepticism essentially unfolds from that very specific sort of problem decomposition of ideas into vivacities distributed across scales, and at what you might call to be patterns or patternings at different sort of levels, right? The thing about Hume's problem is that he thinks

that, yes, just like Hosselle, that there is a component to patterning capacities, which he called vivacitation, creation of vivacities, that is fundamentally predicated upon the opacity of time consciousness. Because otherwise, any sort of patterning or revacitation, which is a part of the faculty of imagination in Jung's sense, falls under the axe of Hume's problem of induction

or variations of it, which is the most toxic sort of problem. You see, you can't actually create a pattern simply by thematic affiliations. That's the most important thing. You need to have thematic affiliations against the backdrop of a certain sort of unitary temporal horizon for them to be affiliated in the first place.

Any last question? Is there going to be any writing releases on this specific update? That would be a book. A whole book?

Yes, a whole book. Brilliant. Do you think Chronosis needs an update as well then? No, I don't think that's what I'm going to touch. no um but yes i mean uh it was great i mean i i prepared a lot of materials but you know as you all familiar with this sort of setups it's just that um it's actually a bad recipe to over prepare uh but yes i have a lot of materials i mean if you want to ask me questions please do send email, I would to the best of my capacities

answer questions from the sort of scrap notes that I've put together. And yet, thank you so much, everyone. I wish you best and great holidays. Love you all. Thank you so much, Reza. Thank you, Reza. Great session. Ciao. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you Hazel. Yeah. Thank you all. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye. Have a good time.